The birth of the nation is undoubtedly a real historical development, but it is not a purely spontaneous one. To reinforce an abstract group loyalty, the nation, like the preceding religious community, needed rituals, festivals, ceremonies and myths. To forge itself into a single, firm entity, it had to engage in continual public cultural activities and to invent a unifying collective memory. Such a novel system of accessible norms and practices was also needed for the overarching consciousness, an amalgamating ideological consciousness: namely, nationalism.
FROM IDEOLOGY TO IDENTITY
For a long time, scholars—especially historians—regarded nations as an ancient, indeed primeval, phenomenon. Reading their writings today, one sometimes gets the impression that history began with the rise of national groups. These thinkers stirred together past and present, and projected their contemporary, homogeneous and democratic cultural world onto perished civilizations. They based their arguments on historical documents produced by the higher political and intellectual powers of traditional societies, translated them into standard contemporary languages, and adapted them to their own conceptualized national world. Because in their view, nations have always existed, they regarded as a new phenomenon the rise of nationalism as a formulated idea.
Gellner’s theoretical land mine shook most scholars. “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round,” he declared with his trenchant radicalism, forcing everyone, even the reluctant, to reevaluate the issue.24 Economic, administrative and technological modernization had created the infrastructure and the need for the nation, but the process was accompanied by deliberate ideological practices for steering—or wishing to steer, where the state system had yet to achieve power—the language, education, memory and other cultural elements that create and define the nation’s contours. The supreme reasoning uniting all these ideological practices required that “the political and the national unit should be congruent.”25
Gellner was prominently followed by Eric Hobsbawm, whose book Nations and Nationalism since 1780 examined how and when political systems, or movements that sought to found states, produced national entities out of blends of existing cultural, linguistic and religious materials. But Hobsbawm appended a warning to Gellner’s theoretical audacity, writing that nations are “dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above, but which cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people.”26
It is not easy to discover what “ordinary people” thought in historical times, because they left almost no written sources, the supposedly trustworthy testimonies on which historians base their work. But the willingness of citizens of the new nation-states to join armies and fight in wars that became all-out confrontations, the masses’ intoxicating enthusiasm for international sports events, their eagerness during state occasions, their political preferences in the most decisive elections throughout the twentieth century—all of these tend to demonstrate that nationalism has been a captivating success story.
And rightly so, since only in the national democratic state are the citizens both formally and mentally the legitimate proprietors of the modern state. Historical kingdoms belonged to the monarchs, princes and nobility, not to the societies that bore these persons on their productive backs. Modern democratic political entities, by contrast, are perceived by the masses to be their collective property. The imagined ownership of the new state is also seen as proprietorship of the national territory. Printed maps, which were not of course available in premodern times, familiarize people with the exact dimensions of their state, the boundaries of their common and “eternal” property. Hence the appearance of, among other things, passionate mass patriotism and the impressive willingness to kill and be killed, not only for the abstract homeland but for every inch of its ground.
It is true that nationalism has spread in different ways through different social classes, and it has certainly not fully erased earlier collective identities, but its victorious hegemony in the modern era is beyond question.
The assumption that it was national ideology that created, invented or shaped the forms of identity and the envisioning of the nation does not imply that this ideology was the accidental invention or the whim of evil rulers and thinkers. We are not dealing here with a dark world of conspiracies, nor even with an industry of political manipulation. Although ruling elites did foster the development of a national identity by the masses, primarily in order to maintain their loyalty and obedience, nationalism is an intellectual and emotional phenomenon that exceeds modernity’s basic power relations. It springs from the intersection of various historical processes that began in the developing capitalist West about three centuries ago. It is both ideology and identity, embracing all human groupings and providing them with an answer to a variety of needs and expectations.
If identity is a lens through which the individual makes sense of the world, and is in fact a condition of subjecthood, national identity is a modern lens through which the state makes sense of a diverse population, making it feel it is a homogeneous and unique historical subject.
The early stages of modernization—the destruction of agrarian dependency relations, the collapse of the associated traditional communal connections, and the decline of the religious beliefs that had provided comforting frameworks of identity—already presented conceptual breaches through which nationalism could enter at an accelerating rate. The breakdown in the forms of solidarity and identity of the small human communities in the villages and towns—caused by occupational mobility and urbanization, and by the abandonment of extended-family homes and of familiar objects and spaces—produced cognitive lacerations that only a total identity politics, such as nationalism, could heal, through powerful abstractions given shape by the dynamic new means of communication.
We find the early buds of national ideology, though still hidden in religious foliage, beginning to flower in the political spring of the Puritan revolution in seventeenth-century England. (Perhaps they had been pollinated by the new Church of England, in its break with the Roman papacy.)27 Following that upheaval, these buds proceeded to open and then spread east and west, along with the process of modernization. The revolutionary period of the late eighteenth century saw their fullest flowering. A national consciousness was beginning to flourish among North American and French revolutionaries, hand in hand with the idea of “the people’s sovereignty,” the mighty war cry of the new era.
The famous phrase “No taxation without representation!” taken up against Britain by the bold settlers of America, already presented this advancing entity’s Janus face of nationalism and democracy. When the Abbé Sieyès wrote his famous essay in 1789, “What is the third estate?,” the still virginally shy national-democratic ideology could be glimpsed between the lines. Three years later, it was borne aloft through the turbulent streets of France. The cult of the national state, with its rituals, festivals and anthems, began to seem natural and obvious in the eyes of the Jacobin revolutionaries and their successors.
Napoleon’s conquests undermined the traditional monarchist structures and accelerated the spread of what might be described as the central ideological virus of political modernity. The national-democratic bug entered the hearts of France’s soldiers when they came to believe that each one of them might be carrying a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Even the circles that sought to oppose the Napoleonic conquests, even the democratic movements that began to challenge the traditional kingdoms, soon became nationalistic. The historical logic of this spreading phenomenon was plain to see: “government by the people” could only be realized in the national state.
There was more. Old, enfeebled dynastic empires—the Prussian and the Austro-Hungarian and, later, the Tsarist Russian—were also obliged to adopt, cautiously and incrementally, the national innovation, in hopes of extending their own survival. In the course of the nineteenth century, nationalism triumphed almost everywhere in Europe, although it would mature only with the passage of the law of compulsory education and, toward the end of the century, the universal franchise. These two major projects of mass democracy also